Everyone thinks Crowley won't sell to Google because he sold his first company, Dodgeball, to Google and Google killed it a couple years later.

That's wrong.

Crowley had to sell Dodgeball back then because he couldn't find venture capital. These days, Crowley knows that Google is one of the few companies out there that would write a $500 million to $1 billion check.

For its part, Google would buy Foursquare because it checks the boxes on several of its recent obsessions: social, local, and deals. Remember, in the past couple years, Google tried to spend billions on Groupon, Yelp, and Twitter.